So once upon a time I was a member of the Postgres community, and spent a goodly while at conferences talking about Python stuff that I worked on.

Most of those things aren’t really useful anymore, but taught me a great deal about database technologies, and open source in general.

I don’t contribute to open source anymore, time constraints being what they are. I wish I did, from one sentence one man once said, to a room full of geeks like me.

You’re helping to move the written and spoken language of computing forward, which is going to solve a lot of really important problems out there. 1

Scott McNealy, 2010

We push the language forward, we define what the future looks like.

It’s almost a throwaway comment, but it meant something huge to me. Even the tiny things we do can have huge effects, bring great change in the world. Through such a small, insignificant action of releasing code.